Silent Water

by P K Adams

  The guard took a firm hold of my arm, pressing just below my armpit the way Konarski had showed him.

  But my tears were falling in an unstoppable flow. “Where is Helena?” I sobbed. “She tried to kill us.”

  “I know.” Konarski quickly took off his doublet and pulled his white shirt up over his head. He began to tear it into long strips.

  “Where is she?!” I heard a note of hysteria in my voice as I wiped my eyes with my uninjured hand. I was gripped by a terror that she was going to come back and finish me and Konarski, and the guard too.

  Konarski began tying one of the strips above where the guard’s hand was pressing. “She was taken back to the castle. She’s not going to hurt anyone,” he said through gritted teeth. “Not anymore.”

  “What about Jan?”

  He pointed with his chin toward the pallet as he tied a knot on my tourniquet. “He’s fine, too, just a bit sore, and his wrists are bruised.” Then he paused, still crouching beside me, and looked me in the eyes with an intensity I had never seen there before. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he put his hand on my cheek. “It’s over, Caterina.”

  He put his doublet back on, then stooped to lift me, for I was unable to stand on my feet. “I will take you to the infirmary. The queen sent for Doctor Baldazzi, and I will have him come to see you immediately.”

  “The queen . . .”

  “She is safe. Don’t worry.”

  “But . . .” I wanted to say that I needed to explain to the queen that Dantyszek had not betrayed her trust, that it was I who had failed in my duties, and that Helena’s crimes were also my fault. But my tongue would not form the words. My thoughts were slowing down, and a sleepiness was overcoming me.

  Making a supreme effort with my remaining strength, I clung to him like a child as he carried me upstairs to the kitchen that looked like a horde of Tatars had just been through it.

  As another guard opened the front door for us, Konarski told him to run to the queen’s apartments and tell Doctor Baldazzi to come to the infirmary. When we were out in the courtyard, I gulped the cold clear air like someone who had emerged from under water at the very last moment of their endurance. But as much as I inhaled, I could not rid myself of the foul smell that lingered in my nostrils. It seemed to have soaked into my clothes, my skin, my very core.

  The snow had all but ceased, but the wind was still blowing, sending white dust swirling off the piles on the ground. Konarski walked slowly, knee-deep in the snow. Eventually we reached the infirmary, which was on the ground floor of the northern wing, right next to the entrance to the castle cellars where we had watched the servants carry barrels of wine not a week earlier. The infirmary was normally staffed by three nuns from a nearby Benedictine abbey, but only one was on duty during the night.

  She led us to an empty bed in the far corner on which Konarski placed me gently. The moment I felt the softness of the hay mattress under me and the blankets he wrapped around me, a softness I had thought I would never feel again, the tension and fear finally released their hold on me. Exhaustion swept over me like a giant wave. The infirmarian and Konarski exchanged some words, but I could not make anything out. For the second time that evening, everything went black around me.

  Chapter 15

  February 1520

  For the next two weeks, I battled a fever from the cold I had caught that night, my body alternately shivering to its very core and swimming in waves of heat. It was made worse by the gash on my arm, through which I had lost a significant amount of blood. Fortunately, Doctor Baldazzi stitched it up well after having cleaned it with wine and vinegar. He also brought me salves and unguents of his own making, for which he procured dried herbs from apothecaries all over Kraków. He claimed that his recipes were the best for protecting wounds and speeding up their healing. Whether they did or whether it would have taken just as long without them, I do not know, but they certainly took some of the sting and tightness off my raw flesh.

  Still, it took a month before I no longer needed bandages and was able to wear a gown again rather than a loose infirmary smock with a shawl draped around my shoulders when I had visitors.

  And I had many of them. The parade of officials, well-wishers, and plain gossip-seekers would have been endless once my fever had abated had I not asked the infirmarian sisters to keep them out. After the maids of honor had visited me, I wished only to see Chancellor Stempowski, who was interviewing witnesses in preparation for Helena’s trial, and Sebastian Konarski.

  The latter came to see me every day, even when I was too ill to talk to him and when my head was too clouded with fever to know who he was. On the first day that I was well enough to sit up in bed, the shawl wrapped around me like a cocoon for propriety’s sake by one of the sisters, he told me how he had managed to find us in the kitchen cellar on the night of the Epiphany.

  At the royal table in the banqueting hall, the chancellor and the king had been discussing the delay of the army’s march north out of Koło due to the snowstorm. Not only would it have to wait until the weather cleared and roads became passable again, but the king, after having finally agreed to send artillery, had changed his mind again for fear that the valuable equipment would suffer damage. It was a decision that would necessitate many dispatches to be drafted and dispositions sent out the next morning, and Konarski could not excuse himself, even when he noticed that I was gone. He grew increasingly worried when I did not return, but he could only go to look for me when the war business was settled and the king rose to retire to his apartments.

  As soon as that happened, Konarski went to inquire with the queen, who had already sent Magdalena to look for me in my chamber. Moments later, the girl returned, saying that I was not there. The queen was about to raise the alarm and order the captain of the guard to search the castle when the Princess of Montefusco, reliably attracted by any sort of commotion, turned up. After learning of my disappearance, she announced that she might be able to help, for she had seen me talking with Doctor Baldazzi in the gallery not two hours earlier. After that speech—which had looked animated but whose content she had regrettably not caught—I ran down the main staircase as if I had all the hounds of hell at my heels.

  “All the while she was saying that,” Konarski recalled, “she was looking at me in a way—it’s hard to describe”—he frowned as he cast his mind back—“as if she thought I knew where you were but was pretending not to. And at the end she winked at me.” He looked puzzled. “She is a strange woman.”

  In the old days—and I could not believe that that meant only weeks earlier—I would have blushed crimson to the roots of my hair. But now I only closed my eyes, my cheeks remaining blessedly cool. Something had changed in me. I felt that—on the inside at least—I had aged many years. I had so much guilt and pain and grieving to overcome that I could no longer afford to become upset by things that were of little consequence.

  That was my new maturity.

  Konarski paused in his story and asked me if I was feeling unwell, but I shook my head and told him to go on. Upon hearing the princess’s revelations, he resumed, the queen sent for Baldazzi, who had already gone to bed, but whom she ordered to be woken and brought before her in his nightshirt and cap if need be. But Konarski did not wait for that. He ran down the stairs, just as I had done earlier, shouting questions at the guards on each floor, finally learning from the sentry at the main door that I had gone out.

  By then, the snow was winding down, and he could discern nothing in the pristine whiteness of the courtyard at first. Then he noticed something dark sticking out of a pile of snow. Grabbing a torch, he went to investigate. It was a headdress, and he guessed that it belonged to me. Nearby he could still see the faint outlines of the tracks I had left, almost completely covered by snow, but they were enough to guide him to the kitchen.

  He took four men-at-arms with him. They tried the main door, but they found it locked. They would have turned back—my tracks around the building having been
completely obscured by snow that had blown against the wall—had one of the guards not had a sweetheart among the cooks and known about the side entrance. Once inside, they found one of the two doors to the cellars slightly ajar, but they did not think much about it, and after searching the ground level, they were about to go to the upper floor. That was when they heard me scream just before Helena slashed me with the dagger. I must have screamed louder than I thought, or the underground passage carried the sound well. Maybe it was both. Either way, I am glad I did it, for otherwise I would have died that night.

  When they got down to the cellars, they heard the door of the last cell being locked from the inside. Fortunately, the lock was old and rusty, and it only took a few kicks from one of the guards to send the door crashing open. That must have happened when I was unconscious, for I have no memory of any of it. The next thing I remember is Konarski kneeling over me and trying to stanch my blood flow.

  When he finished telling me the events of that night, I reached out and put my hand on his as it rested on the edge of my bed. “Thank you, Sebastian,” I said, emotion distorting my voice. “I owe you my life.”

  He smiled but shook his head. “We should all thank you.”

  I gave him a puzzled look. “One of my ladies killed two men and I had no idea, no inkling that would have helped me to prevent it,” I said bitterly. “I failed to protect Helena, and I failed in my duties to the queen. How do I deserve anyone’s gratitude?”

  He squeezed my hand gently but removed it when one of the sisters sent us a disapproving glance. “If it hadn’t been for your questioning and your refusal to accept the convenient explanations”—he dropped his voice—“explanations that the chancellor, the queen, and even I really wanted to believe, Helena would have killed Dantyszek. It took a lot of courage to go against all that and to keep searching for answers. You saved his life, and you put an end to this nightmare.”

  In a low, halting voice—emotion was still choking it, and I had to wipe my eyes with the shawl intermittently—I told him what had transpired in that cellar, everything Helena had told me about the harm that had been done to her. Earlier, Konarski had told me that while she had confessed to the two murders, she had refused to give any explanation for her actions. Now he listened, his face falling as I recounted the awful details of how Zamborski had dragged Helena into the copse by the river while everyone else was laughing and dancing around the bonfires. And how Mantovano had taken advantage of her misfortune to blackmail her afterwards.

  “Those bastards deserved everything that happened to them.” He ran a hand over his face when I came to the end. “It’s a pity that she must follow them to the grave.”

  We were quiet for a long time, watching the watery sunlight of a February day filter through the small square windows of the infirmary, marking pale patches on the opposite wall. Normally, a winter sun, even one so weak, would put me in a cheerful mood, but right then I did not care. The windows had iron bars in them like those in Baszta Sandomierska, where Helena was being held awaiting her trial. Everything around me—and inside, too, for my injured arm still felt tender—reminded me of those terrible events. Would I ever be able to find joy again after all that had happened?

  One of the infirmarians brought me a tray with cheese, bread, and watered wine. I nibbled at the food, but I had no appetite.

  “You should eat more, Caterina,” Konarski’s concerned eyes swept my face. “You look thin.”

  I knew I did. I had caught a glimpse of myself in Magdalena’s small hand mirror when she came to visit me and saw my sunken cheeks and the dark circles around my eyes. A few weeks earlier, Konarski had wanted to kiss me, but I doubted that was the case anymore. The thought threatened to bring fresh tears to my eyes. I tore a bigger piece of the bread and took a sip of the wine with it to moisten it because it felt hard and dry in my mouth, even though it was still warm from the oven.

  “So the chancellor wants Helena to be tried for murder?” I asked when I had finally managed to swallow the food.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Can it not be argued that she was pushed to the extreme and committed those crimes in a state of distress, desperation, and justified anger?”

  A smile crossed his lips. “If you were a man, you would make a fine lawyer.” Then he grew somber again, but there was a sympathy in his eyes that had not been there before I told him Helena’s story. “You can make that case to the chancellor if you wish, but I doubt it will change anything. We found too much evidence of planning for it to be argued that they were spur-of-the-moment crimes.” He paused, and I knew what he was thinking: it was I who had once argued—to none other than Stempowski himself—that the murders had been methodical rather than spontaneous. “And with multiple victims, it will be even harder to persuade the judges of it,” he added.

  He then told me that a search of Helena’s chest had yielded a nightdress with a sleeve and front spattered with blood, and empty medicine bottles with stains of what Doctor Baldazzi identified as poppy milk and belladonna. They were hidden at the bottom under her gowns. Again, I cursed myself for not having been more thorough in my own search. But I had only looked into that chest and saw its disturbed contents on the morning of Dantyszek’s disappearance, too late to have prevented it, and certainly too late to have stopped the murders.

  “The chancellor had her things searched on the morning after she was arrested,” Konarski said. “But on the afternoon of the Epiphany, when we were looking for Dantyszek, the ladies’ chambers were excluded.”

  I recalled his own words when I had suggested, after the mass in the cathedral, that the killer might not have been a man at all, a timid guess I had promptly dismissed but the court jester had made instantly and with such confidence. “Because nobody thought a woman could have committed such violent acts,” I finished for him.

  He nodded, and I saw something approaching admiration in his face. “Helena has a mind equal to that of any man. She planned it all so meticulously. Her traveling trunk was found at the Red Cockerel tavern, where she’d had it sent the day before she was supposed to leave for home. By the way, Mantovano’s ring and chain of office and Zamborski’s purse were in it,” he added. “The chancellor believes that she never left the castle on the morning of January fourth but went to the kitchen directly, and that she spent the night there, sleeping on that makeshift bed that she later had Dantyszek sit on. Until now,” he said, “we didn’t know how she got inside because she is refusing to speak, but you are saying that she had a key from a kitchen maid obtained in exchange for a bribe?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “But how did she manage to make her way there without being noticed?” He scratched the short dark beard he now wore, which suited him just as much as the lack of it had before. “The kitchen was empty by then, but someone should still have seen her walk over there. The courtyard is always busy. I suppose she was very lucky in that, if you can call it luck.”

  I grabbed his hand at a sudden realization but dropped it when a sister paused in her work and looked toward us again. “I know how she did it!” I dropped my voice. “It was very foggy—I remember because that was the morning of Don Mantovano’s funeral, and the carriage in which I rode with the queen to the church of St. Agata had to proceed very slowly for poor visibility. We couldn’t see the gate until it was right in front of us, and in the forecourt, the cathedral was completely invisible. Oh, God.” I put my hand to my mouth. “She may have been walking right by us as we rode out, and we wouldn’t have seen her.”

  “That was also the day you found the threatening note,” Konarski said. “How did she leave that in your chamber?”

  “She must have slid it under the door on her way out. It would have taken her only a few seconds, and the guards pay more attention to who enters the queen’s wing than whoever is already there.”

  I leaned my head against the wooden headboard and closed my eyes, feeling very tired. Things looked bad for Hel
ena. Even if the judges were to believe that Zamborski had assaulted her and that Mantovano had then blackmailed her, they would not be likely to accept that she had killed them on impulse, for, in truth, she had not. She had worked on her plan for weeks, perhaps even months.

  “I will let you rest.” Konarski’s voice came as if from afar.

  I opened my eyes and nodded.

  He looked toward the infirmarian who was feeding broth to a patient on a bed on the other side of the chamber, glancing at us every now and then. He looked back at me, and we exchanged a small smile of understanding.

  “Will you come again tomorrow?” I asked quietly.

  “Of course.” He rose and was about to turn to leave.

  “Sebastian—”

  “Yes?”

  “I would ask you a favor—would you go to the tower and ensure that she is fed and properly clothed?” The image of Maciek on a December night, shivering in his shirt next to an empty plate, stood before my eyes. “You will have to bribe the guards, but I will pay you back.”

  He shook his head. “No need.”

  “And if you see any evidence at all that she has been . . . mistreated . . . by any of the guards—” My voice caught as I tried to stave off another image.

  He leaned over me and touched my cheek, heedless of the nurses. “She won’t be. I will make sure of that.”

  Two days later, Chancellor Stempowski came to officially interview me. With him, he brought a scribe who wrote down everything Helena had told me about her crimes. The chancellor wanted to know if I had any idea who the servant was who had given Helena the key in exchange for ducats, and I said I did not. I had wondered about that too—was it the little scullery maid Marta or the sweetheart of the guard who had led Konarski to the side door of the kitchen? Perhaps it was Michałowa herself? In truth, it could have been any one of the dozens of people who worked there. What was clear was that Helena had not and would not reveal that person’s name. Whether it was her conscience or one final act of defiance on her part, I would never know, but it would keep her accomplice from being branded a traitor and banished from the court for life, or worse.